1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a focus adjustment apparatus and method that performs focus adjustment in a photographing device, such as a digital camera or the like. The invention is further directed to a computer readable recording medium on which a program for causing a computer to perform the focus adjustment method is recorded.
2. Description of the Related Art
When photographing a person, such as photographing a portrait or the like, the image obtained by the photographing will give a blurred impression if the eyes are not brought into focus even though the focus is on the contour of the nose or cheek. For this reason, when photographing a person, it is said that bringing the eyes into focus is a basic practice. In order to bring the eyes into focus, photographing devices having functions to detect the face and eyes of a person from the image to be photographed, and to bring the eyes into focus are proposed as described, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Nos. 2001-215403, 2002-006203, and 2003-107335. Recently, a photographing device capable of detecting a face from the image to be photographed and photographing the detected face appropriately has also been proposed. Further, in a photographing device having face detection capabilities, a method for further detecting the eyes from the detected face and bringing the detected eyes into focus is proposed as described, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-128156.
The photographing devices described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Nos. 2001-215403, 2002-006203, 2003-107335, and 2005-128156, however, have problems that they require a considerable time and large power consumption for focus adjustment, since they invariably detect eyes after detecting a face.